In presidential politics, the elections get the buzz, but it’s the policies that have the bite.
And Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have very different visions for America that, depending on who wins at the ballot box, will translate into important regulatory differences for the fashion industry.
Designers and the retail and apparel industry generally lean toward Harris and the Democrats with their political donations, according to data from the Federal Elections Commission.
But from a policy perspective, experts see a nuanced picture with some sharp differences between the two candidates on areas important to fashion, from corporate taxes to workplace rules to antitrust enforcement.
And on trade, which is vital to the global fashion supply chain, the rhetoric from each side is very different — with Trump, for instance, promising tariffs of 100 percent or more on certain goods, harkening back to the various trade wars he started while in office. On the other hand, the Biden administration has voiced a more measured stance although it has retained the Trump-era tariffs on China.
But rhetoric aside, lobbyists for importers still see too many trade similarities between the two sides’ on the ground policy positions.
“You’ve got a choice between tepid and terrifying,” said Stephen Lamar, American Apparel & Footwear Association, speaking about how both Democrats and Republicans have embraced tariffs.
David French, executive vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation, said: “I wish there was more distinction between the two parties on trade. Donald Trump has never met a tariff he doesn’t love. What Donald Trump has done is make it okay to be as pro tariff as the unions want. So because there’s no political opposition in the system to tariffs, because both parties have effectively consented to a high tariff economic policy, we’re stuck in a policy rut and voters aren’t being given a choice.”
While circumstances will dictate how a President Trump or President Harris weigh in on any particular issue, both are seen at least somewhat as known quantities in the fashion equation.
“In effect, both of these folks are incumbents,” French said. “I know Vice President Harris is only a vice president, but she comes out of the Biden administration. So we have a pretty good indication of what kind of policy direction she’s going to inherit from President Biden’s agenda. At least so far, we’re not seeing marked departures from some of those directions.”
And Trump’s four years in the White House offered a clear look at his presidential style.
Donald Trump in his trademark navy suit and long red tie.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Then, of course, there’s the other presidential style — which is superficial and beside the point to most Beltway types — but front and center for fashion.
“There’s no rule requiring U.S. presidents or their families to buy American, but when they do, their style choices boost brand awareness,” said Susan Scafidi, founder and director of Fordham Law School’s Fashion Law Institute.
“Emerging designers’ hopes are likely pinned on a Harris victory, as she made a point of wearing indie designers including Sergio Hudson and Christopher John Rogers from her earliest days as VP and recently appeared on the cover of Vogue in Gabriela Hearst,” Scafidi said.
“Team Trump, by contrast, favors established and often European fashion houses,” she said. “Although the Trump family has dabbled in the fashion business — ties and gold sneakers from him, fine jewelry and contemporary clothing from his elder daughter [Ivanka Trump] — there was little love lost between the deep-blue fashion industry and his previous administration, and few designers are likely to clamour to dress his entourage if given a second chance.”
The president has the bully pulpit and can drive much of the national narrative, but there’s only so much they can do on their own, whether it be through executive orders or enforcing laws that are already on the books. To really move the needle, the president needs to move in concert with Congress, which is also up in the air politically.
BMO economists Michael Gregory and Sal Guatieri sketched out economic scenarios in a recent report that compared a Democratic sweep of the White House, House of Representatives and Senate with a Republican sweep.
“Under a Harris administration backed by a Democrat-led Congress, continued deficit spending and expanded tax credits to families and manufacturers could provide a modest economic lift in the near term, though with some offset from less business investment in response to higher corporate taxes,” Gregory and Guatieri wrote.
“Under a Trump White House and Republican-led Congress, expect an even larger budget shortfall, corporate tax cuts and a lighter regulatory touch to provide an extra boost to growth, offset to some degree by increased trade protectionism and higher inflation and interest rates,” they said.
But before policy can take hold, Americans need to go to the polls — and they’ll have more than the priorities of the fashion industry on their minds as they make their choice.
This time the stakes are high — both sides have said the future of democracy hangs in the balance.
Vice President Kamala Harris at the presidential debate in Philadelphia.
Getty Images
In a divided country with heated political rhetoric, violence has sometimes emerged. Trump dodged an assassination attempt this summer. In 2020, Trump falsely denied that he lost the election, helping to rile up a mob that swarmed the Capitol with deadly consequences.
Just what happens after the Nov. 5 vote is anyone’s guess — and the fashion industry is bracing.
Polls show an ultra-close race. Trump is again claiming the election is at risk of being rigged. There is also the potential for an Electoral College tie, which would put the result into the hands of the House.
And that is just the tumult out of Washington, D.C. There’s also a war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the lingering threat of COVID-19, the advent of AI and a million other challenges that the next president and the fashion industry will face.
Consultant Drew DeLong, who leads Kearney’s Geopolitical Dynamics Unit, said regardless of who wins the presidency, executives are going to continue to have to keep thinking on their feet.
“For this generation of executives, navigating geopolitical instability is a sustained pressure,” DeLong said. “It’s a sustained headwind that it’s not a one-time decision, it’s something that’s being embedded within the business.
“If you’re a CEO, if you’re a board director, how do you get your team aligned on what needs to be focused on?” he said. “There’s so much happening right now that you can’t focus on everything. That’s difficult and that requires a different muscle.”
DeLong said someone needs to “own” geopolitical risk within a business.
That requires “thinking through how as a business do you not only receive information and react to it…to then be able to go out and engage proactively and shape that environment as well,” he said.
On the election front at least, the picture will start to get clearer — hopefully — when the polls close in two weeks.
One way or another, Harris or Trump are Oval Office bound. Here, what’s at stake for the fashion industry’s business priorities.
A President Harris or a President Trump will move into the White House in January, resetting the political scene.
Getty
Trade
Trade is probably the number one Washington priority for fashion — and it’s been a vexing one for years.
Trump wielded tariffs chaotically, threatening countries with big increases in a way that complicated apparel supply chains even when those duties never materialized. China, of course, was hit with higher tariffs that are still in effect and have made apparel importing more expensive.
“The Biden administration has left the Trump tariffs in place, but now we really call them the Biden-Trump tariffs because they’ve actually been imposed longer under the Biden administration,” the AAFA’s Lamar said.
While the approach to applying tariffs has been easier to read — and therefore less disruptive under Biden, and presumably under a President Harris — Lamar said the current administration has left the duties in place without using them as leverage.
“They haven’t used that to get more market access opportunities and in fact haven’t pursued other market access opportunities at all,” Lamar said. “That’s where that tepid comes in, where it’s just sort of a status quo, but we’re not really seeing new opportunities to grow partnerships around the world.”
Taxes
Trump is “first and foremost a tax cutter,” French said.
“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was very good for the retail sector,” he said. “It saved literally hundreds of billions of dollars over the past seven years for retail, the money that’s been put to work, investing in infrastructure, investing in workforce, investing in competition that has helped to keep prices affordable for our customers.”
And Trump has signaled he would go further.
Meanwhile, French said Biden was moving in the opposite direction, wanting to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent [from 21 percent] while Harris has called for a tax on unrealized capital gains, what she calls a wealth tax.
“When it comes to business taxes, I think the difference between Donald Trump’s insistence to go down and the Harris team’s insistence to go up, they’re pretty stark differences,” French said.
A higher corporate tax rate would collect funds that could also be put toward other national priorities that might, in turn, also benefit fashion.
Sustainability
Fashion brands have been zeroing in on sustainability for years, but regulators are just starting to weigh in.
“The next four years are going to be really decisive in terms of what happens on sustainability,” Lamar said. “The federal government has been AWOL on these issues, and the state governments have sensed that vacuum and have done lots of different things, many of which conflict and contrast each other, and also with the European side.
“The Trump administration, they haven’t proposed too much now and five years ago they weren’t talking in these terms,” he said. “The Biden-Harris team, they’ve done a lot more on environmental stuff, writ large…but on fashion-focused things, they’ve largely been silent.”
In general, Trump has made clear how he balances environmental and business concerns, proudly declining his intention to “Drill, baby drill,” for oil.
Workforce Regulation
The NRF has been working for the past three-and-a-half years to “hold back” Biden’s workforce regulatory agenda, French said.
“We expect that a Harris administration is going to continue to put pressure on employers with new work rules that benefit unions or trial lawyers and make the operation of a retail employer more complicated, more costly,” he said.
As president, Trump pushed deregulation.
“We worked closely with his administration in his first term to enact rational employment regulation that cut the cost of running retail businesses or kept the cost manageable,” French said.
Fashion is subject to the same workplace laws that apply to other businesses, but Fordham’s Scafidi said “state legislatures have recently turned their attention to fashion in specific ways that could be replicated at the federal level under a Democratic administration.”
“The most significant pending federal legislation is the FABRIC Act, which covers some of the same pay-related issues as the recent California Garment Worker Protection Act, as well as investment in garment manufacturing,” she said.
Antitrust
The Biden administration has been aggressively going after big business on antitrust grounds — from suing to block Tapestry Inc.’s $8.5 billion buyout of Capri Holdings to cracking down on Amazon, Google and Visa.
“This is an area where I think the Harris administration could be very helpful,” French said. “But it’s a two-sided coin because certainly the intervention…in mergers or acquisitions among retailers has proven to be costly and controversial.”
At the same time, he said the NRF was “cheering” the Justice Department’s case against Visa, which accounts for more than 60 percent of debit transactions in the U.S. and reaps more than $7 billion in processing fees.
“I’m not sure that a Trump Justice Department is going to take a different approach,” he said. “Donald Trump has not necessarily been a big fan of big banks in the past. An activist FTC is really a complicated entity to deal with for the business community.”
